After reading the previous sections, you may be asking yourself: “hmmmm, how should I go about spacing my training out?”, or perhaps: “How many facets of training can I focus on in a single week”, or even, “What about those darn delayed training effects?”. Well my friend, you no longer have to live in confusion, for these questions will now be answered. This section completes the basic theory on how to arrange and plan out training.
Arranging Training Part II: Delayed Training Effects
The goal of training is always to make steady improvements in performance through long term, consistent workouts. Many times in training however, it may be important or necessary to raise the training load to a point where the athlete will actually regress in progress for a short period of time (usually only a week or two). This concept can be referred to as planned overtraining. Following the short period of training in which the training load was greater than what the athlete could adapt to, the training load is then lowered back down to a point where the athlete can handle and recover from the weekly load on a short term basis. It is during this time of decreased loading that the athlete will find significant performance gains, as the delayed training effect of the heavy training weeks performed beforehand are now filtering down into their current training weeks.
The most common use to exploit delayed training effects is during planned overtraining weeks, also known as “shock weeks”. During this short period of overtraining, the training load is significantly increased for one week, and in some cases two consecutive weeks (double shock) to a point beyond what the athlete can handle. In the lower intensity weeks following the shock week, the athlete will recover to reach higher levels of sport performance.
Delayed training effects can also refer to the residual effects of training a certain variable (i.e. strength, speed, depth jumps) after training that variable has ceased. This concept can prove useful when changing the emphasis of a training program. It can be an effective practice to work hard on a training variable, such as heavy strength training, and then, after a few weeks or months, switch the emphasis to a faster and more power oriented training variable such as depth jumps. When the training variable is switched, the delayed training effect of the strength training will carry over into the time period when depth jumps are performed and will make the composite gains significantly greater!
A good example of other positive aspects of the delayed training effect is performing a resistance training program for 6-8 months prior to the beginning of an upcoming team sport season. Even if the resistance training program is ceased at the start of the season, the residual gains made from the months of resistance training will be in effect for the majority of the season, although they will gradually decline as time moves forward. Take this, in contrast, to an athlete who performed resistance training for only 2 months prior to the start of the season. That athlete’s gains will diminish much more quickly than the athlete who spent a longer training period making those gains. This is also true even if the 2 athlete’s gains were exactly the same from the 6 and 2 month time periods. Even if both athletes increased their lifts by the same amount during that time, the athlete who trained longer will be able to maintain their training results for a longer period of time following the cessation of training. All this goes without saying, of course, that it is important to continue to train strength in-season as well.
This leads into the final training concept in this section known as the “soon ripe, soon rotten” principle. This principle means that an athlete that makes a large performance gain in a short period of time will be very prone to losing those gains in a short period of time. The gains can be lost when they move away from the potent training methods that brought them those gains (typically CNS intensive training methods). Basically, gains picked up in a short period of time can also be lost in a short period of time, and gains made over a longer course of time will stay in effect for longer time periods.This is why true athleticism is gained slowly over time, and not just in a 12 week period.
Spacing Training
A short, but general rule for training is that the more space you can put between your training sessions, the better the overall training result will be. A good example of how this works is that, it is generally not a good idea to do one whole weeks worth of exercises in one ten-hour workout one day out of the week. Even doing two, five hour workouts in one week wouldn’t be a very effective way to train. In order for training to be maximally effective, the total load of training should be spaced throughout the week as effectively as possible.
Separating training into morning and night sessions is the simplest example of how to do this. If you are a team sport athlete, lifting in the morning or at night when practice is in the afternoon is much better than lifting directly after practice. The body will be able to dedicate a lot more of its energy to the individual workouts when it is given time to let its energy reserves recharge. This way maximal energy can be directed towards each individual workout. The body also can recover from workouts more effectively when each workout is kept to one hour or less. Obviously, not every athlete can manage to fill his or her day with three one hour workouts, (which elite athletes will often do) however, this article is written with the assumption that most athletes reading this manuscript are not full time athletes whose job is simply to train. The average athlete has many other responsibilities in life aside from training, so having 3-4 training sessions per day is not always practical.
Many training programs that exist today will actually base themselves on being very high intensity but low frequency, such as performing workouts for lower body power only one time each training week. Although this low frequency method can be very helpful for beginner and intermediate athletes who lack work capacity, it cannot produce good results forever. Eventually an athlete will have to get used to a frequency based setup to achieve good results. It can be a wise principle to actually switch the emphasis between frequency and intensity based training every several training weeks or cycles. In any case, to reach a position of sport mastery, an athlete needs to have a very high work capacity.
How often an athlete is able to train each week is going to depend on whether you are focusing your training on frequency or volume based work. Some programs will have athletes training upper or lower body only twice a week each, where others can have those aspects being trained every single day. Regardless of what setup you are using, try and space out your workload as much as your schedule allows you to. Spacing your training out to the point where you are training in 8-10 smaller sessions a week rather than 2-3 sessions will also have a great effect in terms of stabilizing the training effect. Stabilizing the training effect will mean that you will have more consistent performances when you train more often versus when you beat your body down with very heavy workouts a couple times per week. The human body runs through various cycles and biorhythms throughout the training year, and it can be difficult to expect consistent results when training is performed infrequently. This is especially true in regards to sports where a peak is expected such as track and field, cycling or swimming.
Reserves of the Human Body
The human body is only able to adapt to a few types of training stimuli at a time. Types of training stimuli can include strength, power, speed, speed endurance, and aerobic endurance. If too many different types of stimulus are thrown at an athlete when training, the body will always choose the side of proficiency rather than efficiency. Perhaps the greatest and most important application to consider with speed/power athletes is to watch their level of conditioning (if possible) when undertaking heavy strength training loads.
Research by Moore investigated the strength training practices of a well known NCAA Division I football team. This team underwent a 4 week phase where they performed only strength training exercises, and then followed this with a 5 week training phase that combined both strength training and conditioning work. This recent study found that athletes became stronger and also improved their standing vertical jumps during the 4 week strength training period. Unfortunately, during the combined phase (strength and conditioning), strength in all lifts actually went down, and vertical jump managed to stay the same. After this 9 week phase, the athletes took a week break and then went to spring ball where the conditioning load was reduced. During this time period, the strength and performance levels of the athletes managed to return to their original levels. The bottom line is that you cannot sustain hard endurance based conditioning loads and strength-power loads at the same time and expect them both to increase. Training for power means you need to be selective how much lactate/conditioning work you put in your system.
Summary
- Sometimes it may be necessary to train the body to a point that it does not recover completely after a training week in order to see greater results down the road
- Performance gains that are attained in a short period of time can also be lost in a short period of time. Gains that are made over a long period of time will take longer to dissipate/go away.
- Training sessions should be spaced out as much as possible throughout the course of a week if possible.
- Athletes can only really focus on a few training goals at one time and expect improvements. Training both power and heavy conditioning at the same time will severely limit power gains.
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